Boston

So the last few days I've been in Boston, preparing for and supporting a presentation by Craig Mundie at the Emerging Technology Conference at MIT. Boston is a beautiful place, I wish I could have stayed a couple of days longer to check out the city.

Everything felt a bit last-minute with the demos... As it's not a MS event, I don't have all of the normal support guys that I'm used to seeing taking care of our demos. Somehow, everything came together at the last minute yesterday morning (got to the venue at 6:30 am to finish set up) and the presentation went very well. Then we hauled everything off-stage in 15 minutes, freighted it downstairs in the elevator, broke down all the properties, packed all hardware and shipping out at 2 pm, then flew out at 6 pm back home. Long, long day.

Here's an article about the presentation. It's fun to see something that you set up and ran on YouTube and CNet the very same day!

Grand Central Station

While traveling the subway in NY last Friday I came into Grand Central Station and saw a clump of people gathered around... a voice was coming over some speakers... a familiar voice... who is that?

Frustration

The below photo makes me angry in ways that I can not easily communicate:



Why, you ask, does this photo cause such strong emotions in your good friend, Tim Davis? I'm glad you asked. I would love to tell you about:

THE MOST AMAZING PHOTO THAT I HAVE EVER TAKEN WITH A CELL PHONE CAMERA IN MY LIFE!!!

It's not the above photo. Oh no. But let me start at the beginning.

I'm driving to work one innocuous Tuesday morning, when lo! I spy to my left a golden retriever sticking his whole upper body out of the back seat of a moving car, face to the wind, hair streaking back, paws clamped down to the outside of the car, and a pair of old-school aviator goggles on his noggin! Coolest thing ever, and I absolutely HAVE to capture the moment. The above photo was my first attempt, from two lanes over. I recognize even on my small phone screen that the shot was inadequate, so I race around the car in the lane to my left, cut them off, get right next to this car with dog, and *snap*... THE MOST AMAZING PHOTO I HAVE EVER TAKEN WITH A CELL PHONE CAMERA IN MY LIFE! It was perfect. It was something I could submit on some cute-pet-photo website and win money. It was like the dog knew I was taking the shot and posed just perfectly. I held my camera up and just admired the shot for some time. And then...

And then.

Then I pressed the Home button on my smartphone. This takes me back to the home screen. In a startling flash of realization, I knew that I did not press the "Save" button, which would take the captured shot and save it to my phone. No, I didn't press that button.

I had pressed a different button.

I trumpeted into my car in a high-pitched squeal "NO!" but it was too late. It was gone. And when I went to look at the photo that I was able to salvage, the dog is purposefully turning away from my phone, like he knew the whole time all that would transpire, he knew what would happen, how the cell phone camera gods were set to spite me on that most unfavorable morning on my commute to Microsoft.

PS. Click on the photo to see the larger image and the full spitefulness.